An America Turned Upside Down

What If We Lose The War On Terror- Or Just Quit And Decide To Fight No More?

March 5, 2006|By Tim Rutten Los Angeles Times

Prayers for the Assassin. Robert Ferrigno. Scribner. $24.95. 402 pp.

In skillful hands, so-called imaginative and science fiction can be more than entertaining. It can be a kind of cultural tripwire, alerting readers to the impulses, apprehensions and preoccupations stirring beyond the boundaries of "serious" or "responsible" writing.

At the center of Robert Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin is a clever little conceit. In his vision of the future, Osama bin Laden and his buddies haven't so much won as the United States, demoralized and intimidated, has surrendered.

The setting is 35 years in the future: Millions of Americans already have converted to Islam when the simultaneous explosions of nuclear suitcase bombs destroy New York and Washington, D.C., and a dirty bomb renders Mecca a radioactive ruin. When the terrorists responsible are apprehended, they turn out to be from a renegade Mossad unit. Israel is destroyed, and the survivors are given refuge in Russia. A bloody civil war breaks out in the United States -- the North and West become an Islamic Republic, while fundamentalist Christians establish their own nation in the old Confederacy. (Nevada is a "free state" devoted to vice and commerce, so no change there.)

As the narrative picks up, things are hardly paradisiacal among the American Muslims, who remain locked in a low-level conflict with their Christian antagonists. Meanwhile, the highly militarized Islamic Republic is itself increasingly divided between fundamentalists and "moderns," devout Muslims who favor openness, increased freedom and denim (along with tolerance for the country's Catholic minority and Jews).

The fundamentalists seem to be winning, and the country is sinking into a kind of backward, Third World torpor. The Super Bowl between the Warlords and Bedouins is played in Khomeini Stadium, and Los Angeles International Airport has become Bin Laden International. San Francisco is one of the fundamentalist strongholds, where homosexuals are executed daily and their heads placed along the bridges. You get the picture.

Into this, Ferrigno injects his two protagonists -- they are, of course, also lovers -- a beautiful and fearless young cultural historian, Sarah Dougan, and Rakkim Epps, a retired Islamic soldier who runs a bar and smuggles persecuted Jews and homosexuals. Rakkim isn't just some guy hanging around the VFW hall; he's a "Fedayeen shadow warrior," able to kill roomfuls of armed men. Sarah has come into possession of evidence that the Islamic Republic's origins might not be what they seem to be.

As she and the "ubermensch" Rakkim struggle to solve the mystery and put their findings before the world, they are pursued by the book's best-drawn character, a state assassin, and his boss, a malevolent Muslim mastermind apparently modeled on Hassan i Sabbah, the so-called Old Man of the Mountain, whose heretical Ismaili sect gave the West the word "assassin." Both Sarah and the invincible Rakkim, by the way, just happen to be the wards of the Islamic Republic's chief of state security, which places them at the very center of power.

Here we enter the realm of the garden-variety thriller in which authors are fearless of coincidence and impervious to burdensome literary conventions like character development. Unlike some of his better-selling brethren, however, Ferrigno does manage to keep his pronouns' antecedents fairly clear. Aside from the characters' occasional lapses into monologues meant to display the author's research, the dialogue has the snappy gloss of cinematic patter.

Ferrigno has a serious subtext in mind, as he explained in an online author's statement for Amazon.com's British site. There he wrote, "I make it clear that the USA was never defeated militarily, but bled white by a conflict without end, weakened internally by dissent, economic malaise and a consumer culture hostile to people's thirst for meaning ... I sometimes think that people who can't imagine Americans' converting to Islam are deaf to the serenity and comfort of a deep religious faith."

There's a lot of this stuff at the edges of our culture these days. At the low end, it's obviously going to express itself in thrillers of this sort. At the high end, it tends to focus on the West's purported loss of confidence in its Judeo-Christian identity and the political values to which it gave rise. What tends to be overlooked in all this Spenglerian apprehension is that the one thing truly free societies never can be free of is doubt.